About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

15 October 2013

'Julius Caesar' (Donmar Warehouse)

I hadn’t been to St. Ann’s
Warehouse in DUMBO since March 2012 when I saw the Wooster Group-New York City
Players collaboration, Eugene O’Neill’s Early
Plays, but on Friday evening, 4 October, my frequent theater companion,
Diana, and I drove over the Manhattan Bridge to see the U.S. première of Donmar
Warehouse’s all-female Julius Caesar,
which opens St. Ann’s 2013-14 season.(Early Plays, reported on ROT on 14 March 2012, was presented in
St. Ann’s previous location on Water Street, its home since 2000.The theater moved to Jay Street later in 2012
and will move again to new, permanent digs back on Water Street in 2015.)Scheduled to run through 3 November, the
Brooklyn production began previews on 3 October and opened on 9 October.Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, Shakespeare’s play was presented in London from November
2012 to February 2013.Most of the
London cast remains with the New York staging, including Harriet Walter (as Brutus),
who appeared as Queen Elizabeth I in Lloyd’s production of Friedrich Schiller’s
Mary Stuart in 2009 (see my report on
ROT, 22 June 2009).

Lloyd has reset the
Roman forum to a women’s prison where the inmates and guards perform the drama
of power, murder, and betrayal.According
to Donmar’s publicity, Lloyd believes that the play’s impact is enhanced “by
the backdrop of female incarceration, a live thrash metal band, and the
emotional nuances inherent to women playing men at their most vulnerable.”For the International
Herald Tribune review of the London performance, Matt Wolf described the
presentation as “belligerently high-concept.”

A fair amount of the
advanced press coverage has been focused on the gyno-centric nature of the
cast.Most make the point that there
have always been lots of all-male Shakespearean productions, including the
Globe Theatre renditions of Twelfth Night
and Richard III (both in 2012), which will open in rep on Broadway in
November.Of course, almost all the coverage
has mentioned that in Elizabethan times, all of Shakespeare’s female characters
were played by males—usually boys—and no women were permitted on stage (Shakespeare in Love notwithstanding)
until the tradition was imported from France and the Continent after the
Restoration in 1660.(The existential
trick comes when those women-played-by-males disguise themselves as men, a
frequent conceit in Shakespeare: consider Viola in Twelfth Night and Imogen in Cymbeline,
among others.) Lloyd’s
Julius Caesar, which started life the
year Josie Rourke was appointed the first female artistic director of Donmar
Warehouse,is by way of
turn-about.Note has been taken, too,
that women playing male Shakespearean characters is itself an old tradition,
including Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet in 1899 and more recently, Fiona Shaw’s
Richard II in 1995 at the National and Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero at the Globe
in 2000.(In this country, Sarah Siddons
performed
Hamlet in 1775 and in 1983, Diane Venora played the role for Joseph Papp.In 1837, Charlotte Cushman played Romeo in
Albany to her sister’s Juliet.)Last June
and July, another Julius Caesar on
stage in New York City, the Smith Street Stage’s modern-dress production in
Carroll Park, Brooklyn, presented a Julius Caesar not only performed by a woman
but as a woman (still named Julius); Trebonius
and Cicero, were also played as females.In the
performance at St. Ann’s, the female prisoners are all playing men.

St. Ann’s
artistic director, Susan Feldman, said at first she thought the all-female
concept “would be gimmicky”—until she saw a performance.Arguments supporting Lloyd’s
interpretation range from combating the dearth of juicy roles for women,
especially in the classics, to balancing the scales for all the men-as-women
productions, to female empowerment (all those women with weapons and
power!).At least one theater writer, Tim Walker of The Telegraph, declared, “[W]hat a load of old tosh it all is.”(For the Brit-deficient, ‘tosh’ is what our English cousins say when
they mean ‘crock of shit.’)He went on
to spit out, “Shakespeare never, after all, believed that a single word he
wrote would ever be uttered upon a stage by a woman . . .” and ultimately laid
the blame for his dismay on Lloyd: “It is an absurd contrivance which
serves only to demonstrate quite how imprisoned the director is by a patently
daft idea, if not also her political correctness and vanity.”To add insult to injury, Walker made a point
of praising the Globe’s two all-male productions, calling them “classy,
respectful and hugely entertaining.” (The Telegraph was apparently so
aggrieved by the production that it ran three negative reviews.)

The Donmar
company seems to have espoused the rationale that the production gives women
chances to do the kind or meaty and substantial parts usually reserved for
men.“It's not just about
employment in the theater,”says
Rourke. “It's about
hearing women's voices at the center of things, literally giving them roles to
play in life and art.”Lloyd asserts that this Julius Caesar gives the actresses opportunities to play roles other
than “the love interest, the tyrant’s wife, the tyrant’s mistress,” and Frances
Barber, Caesar at St. Ann’s, feels that the director “wanted us to get rid
absolutely of any sort of frilly, female, wily, seductressy nonsense.”“I
find myself playing a lot of wives and girlfriends,” says Jenny Jules, the
production’s Cassius, “or parts that support the men's meat-and-potatoes
roles."Jules continues: "It's
really fantastic to just be given the chance to chomp on somebody like
Cassius. . . .If, as a woman, I have
been allowed to be aggressive or confrontational or violent on stage, the
character is always thought of as the villainess.“And Cush Jumbo, who plays Mark Antony, adds
that “you have to be the soundboard of your own work. You have to balance things out carefully so as
not to offend; you feel you can't go too far one way or the other.” The production’s Brutus, Harriet Walter, had
felt that her Shakespearean days were behind her because of the lack of strong
female parts.“Once I’d played
Cleopatra,” Walter explains, “I thought,
‘Now what can I do?’ Because any other female role I was offered in the
Shakespeare canon was going to be inferior and less demanding. There was a
certain logic to then turn to the male repertory.”Lloyd, however, also takes up the empowerment
argument: “We’re on a mission to inspire women to find their voices.”Her aim is to “to make young women in the
audience feel they are potentially part of not just the romantic and the
domestic, but that they could be at the center of the political sphere.”Says Lloyd, “I wanted to celebrate the
first time that a woman got the reins of what we would call a ‘big hitter’ in
London theater.”

Obviously, I
can’t speak much to Lloyd’s last point, but I recognize the first ones.Back in the ’70s and ’80s, African-American
actors were making similar arguments for color-blind casting in classical plays
because so many talented and well-trained actors weren’t getting the
opportunities to play these great roles.While it was fine to take a white actor and smear him with blackface so
he could play Othello (Laurence Olivier, famously), why wasn’t it okay to cast
a black actor as, say, Iago?(In fact, I
saw a very interesting staging of Othello
in Washington with Avery Brooks as the Moor and Andre Braugher as his Ancient.And last April, the Royal Shakespeare Company
brought its 2012 production of Julius
Caesar, whichdirector Gregory Doran relocated to
contemporary Africa with an all-black cast, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.)Color-blind
casting may be a little easier to finesse than gender-blind, but the point is
still the same.It only remains, as far
as I’m concerned, how well the director conceives the transformation and how
well the company executes it.But, with
Tom Walker’s response in mind, I would never reject the concept: if Portia can
stand before a Venetian court and argue that “The quality of mercy is not
strained” in drag, then I can’t see denying a Redgrave, a Shaw, or a Walter the
chance to stand on a stage and pronounce the great (male) speeches of the
Bard.(I’ve written on ROT on the subject of “non-traditional
casting.”See my post on 20 December
2009.)

So, before I assess how well I think Lloyd and the Donmar
troupe executed their idea—or how well that idea itself worked on the St. Ann’s
stage (well, performance space: there’s not really a stage per se)—let me try to describe the production.It’s an integral part of the concept of the
show.First, you’ve read that the play
is set in a woman’s prison—but that’s not entirely accurate.This is a production of Julius Caesar by a group of inmates and the “set” (designed by
Bunny Christie) is their common room (or whatever you’d call it), a large open
space at the back of which is a wall with a garage-type door slightly stage right
of center, a glassed-in booth with closed-circuit TV monitors stage left for
the guards to survey the cell block (it also serves as the tech booth and the
techies are costumed as guards, too), and a split-level catwalk with a metal
railing that’s about seven feet up on stage right and maybe 10 or 12 feet high
on the left; there’s a flight of metal stairs connecting the two levels.The space, which has a bare cement floor, is
set up like a proscenium stage with the spectators in steep metal risers across
the front of the acting area.There are
two concrete columns just in front of the risers, the stage right one of which
is occasionally used as a sort of crow’s nest.The rest of the set is made up of whatever furniture and detritus lie
about the space, found objects as it were, mostly odd chairs, a table or two,
and porn mags.

The inmate company—we don’t learn who produced or directed the
diegetic performance, one of the prisoners, a prison staffer, or some outside contractor—seems
somehow to have come up with makeshift costume pieces such as great coats, berets,
and ski masks to cover their gray prison sweats, as well as props like red
rubber gloves (to represent the bloody hands of the conspirators), a paper
Burger King crown, knives (stand-ins for Shakespeare’s swords), and rifles and
pistols (all harmless fakes, obviously).(No credit is listed for the costumes, though they were apparently put
together by designer Christie; the fights were choreographed by Kate Waters and
the movement director was Ann Yee.)The
lighting is harsh and white, as if from fluorescents or floods (though, to be
sure, it was subtly designed by Neil Austin for appropriate theatrical effects
without violating the conceit) and the sound, including the heavy metal band on
a rolling platform, is loud and unmodulated in the hard-surfaced, undampened
room.(The sound was designed by Tom
Gibbons and the music composed by Gary Yershon.)

The audience, which had been waiting in the Brooklyn
Roasting Company, a coffee-roasting business next door, enters through the
garage doors on Jay Street, herded and monitored by guards (starting with the
only two males in the company, who I think are either actual security guards or
members of the St. Ann’s staff as they merely checked tickets and ushered us
into the holding area, which looks like a loading dock.(St. Ann’s new theater was formerly a
furniture warehouse.)There a squad of
female guards warns us of the rules for prison visitors, our assigned role;
hands out a list of “Visiting Information” (“If in an emergency you need to
leave your seat, a prison officer will be present to escort you out.Please be aware there is NO re-admission”);
and barks instructions at us.A second
garage door opens on the platform at the other end of the loading dock, and we’re
marshaled up the steps and into the performance area. The performance, it’s
clear, has already begun.

Once we’re seated—the spectators are herded over from the
coffee business in two groups and the metal garage doors are opened and closed
for each group, like passengers on a space ship passing through an airlock—the
actors are escorted in through the inner garage door by a squad of officers who
depart before the action starts.This is
a kind of environmental performance because, even though the actors use only
the “stage” area, the whole room is part of the performance environment since
we spectators are designated characters in the production.

The play-within-the play, once it’s started, for the most
part continues without the prison envelope leaking in directly.There’s a modern-language preamble in which Mark Antony (Cush Jumbo) and her
fellow inmates, wearing paper masks with Caesar’s (that is, Barber’s) face, participate
in what Huffington Post’s Michael
Giltz calls “a rousing bacchanal” set
to punk-rock music (one on-line reviewer identifies the song as “a punk
karaoke version of Jackie DeShannon's “When You Walk in the Room,” but I didn’t
recognize it) that was an evocation of Caesar’s triumphant return to Rome.Then,
in the scene in which Caesar is killed, one member of the audience—it was a man
the night I saw the show—is selected to come down and sit in one of the chairs
occupied by the senator-assassins.His
only role is that of observer or witness and after the assassination, he’s
escorted back to his seat.(I’m not sure
what the point of that is, however.)More significantly, when Cinna the Poet appears, the actress portraying
him is suddenly called out by an officer and another inmate (Helen Cripps) is
pushed forward, a script thrust into her hands, and Julius Caesar continues.A
few moments later, when the crowd attacks the poet as a stand-in for Cinna the
conspirator (Meline Danielewicz),
the violence becomes more “real” than playacting—“Ow, that fuck ing hurt!” yells the jailbird—and
the guards come rushing in to break up the assault.Nonetheless, the atmosphere of the jail, in
the terms of the popular imagination (consider Oz, Prison Break, or any
such depiction), permeates the whole production, both the outer one and the
diegetic one—which isn’t really surprising since we’re sitting in the set.

Now, I have to report that I was sorely disappointed in the
whole proceeding.A while ago (18 September 2009), I published an article on
ROT called “Similes, Metaphors—And
The Stage” in which I discussed the simile production, an interpretation
of classic plays that “simply
shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own,” and the metaphorical
kind that “examines the play from the inside, ‘generating provocative
theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific,
reverberant rather than concrete.’”(My
article was based on Robert Brustein’s “Reworking
the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” in the New York Times, which I
republished on the blog on 10 March 2011.)I put Lloyd’s version of Julius
Caesar at the “the prosaic simile” end of the continuum, some distance from
“the poetic metaphor.”To be frank, it
all seemed to me like “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I can well understand the impulse to let women
inhabit those powerful male characters and get to speak those stirring
words.I have no fundamental objection
to resetting a classic play, as I revealed in “Similes, Metaphors.”So, what went awry, in my estimation, with
Donmar’s Julius Caesar?As I see it, three failings help keep this
from being a good theater experience: the company’s philosophy or rationale,
the production concept, and the physical production.I’ll start with what did work for me,
however: the acting.

The JC
ensemble is mixed as far as experience and classical background is
concerned.Some, like Walter, who was made a Dame Commander of the
Order of the British Empire in 2011, and Barber, have
done all the major female Shakespearean roles and other classic parts; others
are just starting out in their careers and have done mostly contemporary plays
and film or TV roles.Nonetheless, the company
handled the characters well, not to mention the poetry.If you add in the conceit that the actors are
all playing prison inmates who are putting on a Shakespeare play, they come off
even better because it lends an element of innate tension, violence, and anger
to that of the Shakespearean story.There’s no issue with the cast managing these male roles.That’s especially true since the actresses
aren’t pretending to be men, even if they’re not turning the male characters
into women (as the other Brooklyn production of JC did).I had no trouble
accepting Walter as a strong, upright person with sincere beliefs and concerns
but simultaneous doubts and insecurities about the severity of the actions he’s
forced to take.Walter is forthright
and, while a commanding stage presence, thoughtful and occasionally
uncertain.Barber, by contrast, is more
the gang leader, the warlord.She’s
shorter than Walter and, in the trench coat and beret, presents a square
figure, solid and inflexible—what New
York Timesman Ben Brantley describes as “the butchest of them all.”(In fact, Barber’s stage image
reminded me a lot of Boris Badenov, the Pottsylvanian spy character in the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon series of the 1960s, but without the
accent—or the mustache.Sorry—I know I’m
a geezer.What can I say?)Barber exudes Caesar’s self-confidence (he
defies the “Ides of March” warning, for instance) and innate cruelty (he
force-feeds Jenny Jules’s Cassius a donut just because he looks
suspiciously “lean and hungry”), but comes off as somewhat one-notish for the
portion of the play in which the character appears.

In the final analysis, however, I found I was
only mildly taken by Lloyd’s rationale for mounting this interpretation.Yes, I know that actresses are given short
shrift when it comes to the juicy roles in the classics.In his review of the production, Brantley
called Julius Caesar “one of Shakespeare’s most manly tragedies,” and someone did a count showing that the word ‘men’ comes up 54 times in JC and ‘women’ gets only four mentions.But that’s not a revelation, and the perceived need to redress it isn’t a
new phenomenon, either.It seems to me
that far too much emphasis has been placed on the rationale for doing this
all-woman staging when all that’s really necessary is just to do it—and spend all the effort and focus
on making the production’s point—the one about power, control, resentment, and repression.I believe we’ll get the idea about female
empowerment, both from a social and a theatrical standpoint.Audiences aren’t really that benighted,
though some directors and producers like to think we are.(I wrote a post called “To Note, Or Not To Note” in which I made this point; see ROT
on 28 August 2009.)Do the show, I say; let the
socio-political point fend for itself.

There’s a problem inherent
in Lloyd’s fundamental premise, however.She chose to do the play with women playing men: the characters are
still men doing all that power-wielding and saber-rattling.Diana suggested it might have been more
interesting if the characters were the women inmates—a sort of West Side Story with JC as Leonard Bernstein, et al., did
with Romeo and Juliet: turn the Roman
men into contemporary female prisoners, say one jailhouse gang (led by Caesar
and then Mark Antony) fighting another (commanded by Brutus and his crew) for dominance
in the yard.I’d need more time to think
that out, but it would accomplish one thing this interpretation could use: putting
the actual women, rather than women portraying men, in the positions of
strength and control.That’s the point
of the exercise, as I understand it—along with the artistic one of letting
actresses speak those magnificent lines.(To be precise, the actresses at St. Ann’s aren’t really playing the men
of Julius Caesar.They’re playing female convicts who are playing the Shakespearean parts.But we never learn who the prisoners are or
what they want from this
experience.They’re not really there.)I said
this cast handled the powerful poetry excellently, but whoa!—how magnificent would it have been if actresses like Walter,
Barber, Jules, and Jumbo got to bust loose on the roles themselves, too? I’d pay to see that! As it is, there are actresses saying the words—but not women. It would take a lot
more thought to create such a metaphorical adaptation than Lloyd’s simile
production requires.The first concept
would be a more complex reconsideration than the second, which requires really
nothing more than casting and a little costuming.Lloyd’s version of the play doesn’t so much
empower women as simply provide an opportunity for non-traditional
casting.That’s a nice goal, righteous
and worthy on its own, but it doesn’t do what Lloyd’s troupe says their goal is
and what Donmar’s and St. Ann’s publicity proclaims the show’s all about.

Now, I’ve gleaned from
other cultural evidence (TV and movies, for instance) that social upheavals
seem to come to the fore in Britain some years after they hit here.British society, at least in its TV
incarnation, went through the issues of racism long after they’d become
familiar subjects of treatment in our cultural media, and the same with
feminism and women’s issues.(By the
time Prime Suspect hit British TV,
the idea of a female police detective with rank was no longer a new idea on
U.S. sets.We’d already done Cagney & Lacey, not to mention Police Woman, and female lieutenants and
captains were already presences in TV cop shops here. If Helen Mirren hadn’t been
so good and the show overall so well made, they wouldn’t have gotten much
notice.The gender politics in the
series seemed so settled to me that when it came up, it felt absolutely
retro.)I’m not saying that the problems
have all been resolved.Of course they
haven’t; and we still have sexism, not to mention racism, in even official
situations where you’d think it was long passé.But as a selling point—‘We’re going to expose sexism and gender bias in
the theater and strike a blow for women’s equality!’—just isn’t going to move
me much.I mean, didn’t we do that 30 years ago?Not solve it, but make it an issue?My consciousness has been raised,
people!

Of course, I’m not saying
don’t do the show.I’m saying don’t sell
it on the basis of the contemporary (your
contemporary) politics.Focus on the play’s politics, Shakespeare’s
politics.If you do your jobs well, the
politics will take care of itself—you’ll make your argument.And, what’s more, I’ll get to come out of the
show thinking, ‘Hey, they made a good point.That’s right, too—and it’s still happening, isn’t it.’I’ll feel like I worked something out without
being led by the nose.But tell me ahead
of time, beat it into me that that’s what you’re up to, I’ll do what I’ve done
now: come out of the theater (or, really, sit in it as the play’s unfolding)
and say, ‘Okay, but I know all this—it’s the 21st century, for goodness’
sake.You could say it in a sentence and
it’d be just as revelatory as all this mishegoss.’

This disappointment with
the context for the production was exacerbated by the discomfort generated by
the physical set-up.I already said the
production is loud—the cement-and-metal room reverberates—and the heavy metal
thrash music adds to this condition.The
actors all speak at top volume, though I’m sure there’s a rationale for that
(prisons are loud places, men in combat shout a lot, and so on).St. Ann’s molded plastic seats are hard (and
I’m more than a touch arthritic; I said I was a geezer, remember), so
prolonged sitting in a stiff, hard seat isn’t the greatest of pleasures for
me.Furthermore, the performance is two
hours long without an intermission—no chance to unkink the joints or stretch
what pass for muscles.(There’s a
practical reason most intermissionless shows are 90 minutes or less.)Finally, the space isn’t air-conditioned and
the heat builds up in the enclosed, concrete room with thousands of watts of
stage lighting burning for a couple of hours.Within minutes, sweat was dripping down my face and rolling down the
back of my neck.Ick!(According to one of the Donmar performers
acting as a guard when we were leaving, the company doesn’t usually perform in
the warm season, but no one expected early October in New York City to be so
August-like.St. Ann’s does have
air-conditioning—they turned it on after the play was over—but it’s an industrial
system that makes a racket too loud for actors to project over the noise.)By the time the performance was over, I was
so anxious just to stand up, much less leave the room, that I’d begun to phase
the play out.Now, that’s clearly
counterproductive.(I confess that I
feel uncomfortable letting physical discomfort affect my response to a theater
performance, but I suspect that had I been engaged by the art more, the conditions
in the auditorium wouldn’t have weighed so heavily on me.It’s something of a chicken-and-egg proposition,
I guess.)

At this writing, days after the production’s New York
opening, not all outlets had run reviews.(There are quite a few London notices on line, of course, such as the
London Times and the Guardian, not to mention the IHT review that ran in the New York Times, but I didn’t comb through them.)A “high-octane” production “brilliantly directed by Phyllida Lloyd” with “a terrific cast,”Elisabeth
Vincentelli of the New York Post calls
the Donmar staging at St Ann’s.It’s “gripping all the way through, from brutal beginning to bloody end,” the Postwoman declares, but “more than
trendy shtick” which all “builds to a coherent theme.”Also
dubbing Lloyd’s JC “gripping,” the Times’sBrantley affirms, “A woman’s touch has not softened the hard and mighty
‘Julius Caesar.’”The play maintains its
“muscular strength and ferocity,” the Times
reviewer writes, remarking, “The women playing men here seem poised to challenge the entire audience to
put up its dukes—and perhaps to pull out contraband switchblades.”Lloyd’s “crackling troupe,” Brantley
says, delivers the Bard’s poetry “with a fiery fluency” under her “ingenious”
staging.In AM New York, Matt Windman reports, “The acting is extraordinary”
and the production “is filled with inventive touches.”Scott Brown calls Donmar’s JC “demonically fun, punk-pugnacious, occasionally unhinged” in his New York magazine review, and affirms
that Lloyd’s “ferocious cast quietly underlines [their] point with joyously
unquiet performances.”“Nervous shivers
of race and gender domination run just beneath the show’s skin,” says Brown,
but the production’s “gender-flip isn’t polemical; it’s clarifying.” Concluding that “here’s a Caesar that doesn’t even need balls; it’s got gall,” the New York reviewer asserts that Lloyd
uses her conception “to thrilling effect here, teasing out the play’s deeper
misanthropy, its anti-revolutionary despair and wounded cynicism.”In Time Out
New York, David Cote describes Lloyd’s staging of Julius Caesar as “blisteringly tense and
crystalline” and the company as a “fierce ensemble.”The man from TONY concludes, “Director and company may take great liberties with
their frame, but this may be the most thrilling, lucid and, yes, authentic Julius
Caesar for years to come.”

In the cybersphere, Zachary Stewart writes on TheaterMania that this JC has been “brilliantly reimagined” by
Lloyd into “an action-packed, sharp rendition” that “emphasizes the force of
personality over the public imagination.”Stewart’s conclusion is, “It is impossible to
walk away from this production without new insights into the original text,
which feels as relevant, prescient, and alive as ever.”On CurtainUp, Deirdre Donovanwrites that Lloyd’s transformation of Julius Caesar “ingeniously
adds a new twist to the testosterone-laden work.”It’s “a must-see for Bardolators,” says
Donovan, bringing “new meaning to that theatrical phenomenon called ‘double-time’”
that “pushes the theatrical envelope, and then some.”She concludes, “You will be pulled into the
action” of “a first-rate director's vision of a Shakespeare play” performed by
“a solid ensemble.”On Huffington
Post, which once again ran two notices, David Finkle asserts that Donmar’s
prison-set JCis “all in good, grim fun
and works well” and that Lloyd “guarantees that the cast does well.”But Finkle spotlights “one major, and I mean truly major, drawback”: the
Caesar Barber plays and Lloyd directed is “the worse [sic] kind of bully”
about whom audiences are likely to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”This undermines the idea that the dictator’s supporters
might indeed be noble (or even entirely rational), weakening the play’s
premise.In Huffington’s other
review, Michael Giltz calls Donmar’s Julius Caesar “an exciting new
production” that’s simply “the best Julius Caesar I've ever seen” and “certainly
one of the top shows of the year.”Praising
the production unsparingly, Giltz goes on to affirm that “the direction is
focused and inventive while the performances are clear as a bell, moving and
believable at every moment.”

It
was just too much effort to review all the London reviews (and only minimally
relevant since I’m not discussing that show), but I have mentioned that the Telegraph
gave the show not one, not two, but three bad notices.Wolf’s IHT review was unfalteringly
positive, but as I was surfing the pertinent websites for tidbits of
information on the production, I came across a couple of blogs that begged to
differ, if you will.On R3OK, the blogger who
calls himself (I’m assuming) HtoHe said bluntly that “whether or not the idea
of an all-female Julius Caesar is valid, Phyllida Lloyd’s execution of
it was, imo [in my opinion] of course, an unholy mess.”(The blogger joked that he figured Lloyd had
made “a bet that she could put on an all female Julius Caesar and
include smoking, swearing and nudity and get half the hacks of the British
press to declare it a triumph.”)Of the
basic concept for the Donmar production, HtoHe thought it was “all too
embarrassing if, as it seemed to me, the director takes full advantage of the
blurring of boundaries to indulge herself—or, being less charitable, to throw
all sorts of inconsequential guff into the mix.”In the end, the blogger summed up: “From the
very start, . . . the classic play was used as padding for a prison story that
had next to no substance.”

The blogger Tilly
Lunken allowed on her site, Onomatopoeia, that Lloyd places JC in
“what appears to be an entirely appropriate context,” but found that the
interpretation “does not satisfy because fundamentally it does not address what
it arguably should be aiming to—the main drive of the production—the women.”Lunken, a writer who works mostly in theater,
deplored the lack of female characters (there are only two, aside from the
prison officers) and asked, “But where were the women?”Lunken determined that “it appears the entire
construct of the women’s prison is just that. A directorial decision to justify the casting,”
or, as the sometime dramaturg put it: “a gimmick.”Of the prison environment, the blogger said,
“It doesn’t hold a mirror to the action, it doesn’t complement the action—it is
reduced almost to a container for the action and little more.”“The key principle of bringing a classical
work into a contemporary context,” Lunken, recently accepted onto the Royal
Court Young Writer's program, instructed, “is to use the new and working with
the existing text create dynamic relationship between the two elements.”It’s up to theatermakers, the blogger
insisted, to “think hard about the implications of a particular setting and
casting decision, to work with the politics of this and use them in the work.”That’s what was missing in the Donmar’s Julius
Caesar, as both Lunken and I seem to have felt.

2 comments:

As Rick has said elsewhere, the play isn't harmed by doing it with various approaches. If you cast "Julius Caesar" with all women... with all men, as Shakespeare did it... with a mixed cast... with penguins... whatever you do, the play will still exist for someone else to work on it. Fortunately.

Well, yeah--and I truly believe that. (I did say that I wasn't suggesting not doing the show.) But that doesn't indemnify the production from criticism for wrong-headedness or failure. Even my criticism!

Besides, I'm just reporting my responses. It's entirely a personal assessment, so I may be wrong. But I may be right!